I tested 5 sscreen readers for, among other things, the handling of
special formats in Word documents in 2011, only one of them announced
formatting by default (think it was System Access,but don't have the
repot to hand). In a web browser they never announce special formats,
with the caviat that I have not tried the Jaws 14 beta, and I have not
tried Windows Eyes (was not able to do so as part of said tests).
If anyone´s interested in a link to this report, which covers a lot of
screen reader functionality with Skype, web browsing, word, instant
messaging etc, just email me off list or I can post the url here
tomorrow (we´ve been changing around our website so the article is
temporary not on there).
Thanks
-Birkir

On 9/26/12, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:00 PM, David Ashleydale wrote:
>> I remember being surprised to learn that JAWS doesn't alert users when it
>> comes across emphasized text by default.
>
> This has been addressed on this list numerous times for at least a
> decade, but it does come as a bit of a surprise because this is basic,
> 15-year-old HTML semantics that should be very simple to implement in
> screen readers.
>
>> As to the original poster's question, I don't see why a certain word or
>> phrase would need to be doubly emphasized with both italics and bold.
>
> In (X)HTML < 5, if an element has <strong>, it's strongly emphasized
> whether it has <em> or not. <strong>Hello!</strong> would be no
> different semantically than <strong><em>Hello!</em></strong>.
>
> The HTML5 specification, however, allow nested <strong> and <em> to
> convey increased emphasis. The example I use is:
>
> <em>Wow! That is <strong>really, <strong>REALLY</strong></strong>
> impressive!</em>
>
> If don't know how screen readers would convey this, except perhaps
> through volume (but who likes being yelled at?). But that problem is
> not really a present concern - getting basic support for *any* level
> of emphasis would be a nice start.
>
> Jared
> > > >